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The Reading Shelf

NW Native Art • The Reading Shelf • Guide 7 of 8

Guide, Week 7. What Is Not Shared

Start with this week’s Reading before diving into this Guide.

Three ways to use this guide. If you are in a live class, read before seminar and bring the questions with you. If you are working around a missed class, write your responses to the thinking questions and you have done the week. If you are fully self-guided, take the questions at your own pace, and take this week slowly.

Key terms

snew / ts'exwtén / House property
Hul'q'umi'num' categories of owned knowledge, covering private family knowledge, inherited ritual property, and hereditary names, songs, and histories, each with defined rules of use (Thom, 2003).
Witnessing
the living archive. Witnesses at namings are called, gifted, and obliged to remember and testify.
The potlatch ban (1885-1951)
the Canadian criminalization of the potlatch and winter dance. Secrecy became survival under law.
Writing around
Bierwert’s model of scholarship that treats the longhouse as a social institution without ritual exposition. Suttles wrote persistence, not content.
Thomas v. Norris (1992)
cited here only as proof the practice is living and internally debated. Its descriptions stay closed.
Sovereign openness
Lummi’s First Salmon Ceremony is held publicly, while Swinomish and Nooksack hold theirs members-only. Same tradition family, different sovereign choices.
OCAP / CARE
modern data governance frameworks. Old Coast Salish law, finally translated.

Thinking questions

  1. The reading claims not-sharing is a working institution, not a gap. Restate its strongest three pieces of evidence in your own words. Which one moved you most, and why?
  2. A society that pays witnesses understands information as consequential. List what your world pays to remember (notaries, auditors, archives) and what it pays to forget. Where does ceremony knowledge fall in each system, and what does the difference reveal?
  3. Secrecy here did two jobs, spiritual law and survival under criminalization. Can you cleanly separate the two today? Should a student even try, or does the attempt itself repeat the old prying?
  4. Amoss’s 1978 monograph exists in libraries. You could read it. Construct the honest argument for why you will not, without using the word “respect.” (Ownership, consent, circulation, and harm are all available to you.)
  5. Lummi opens its First Salmon Ceremony and Swinomish closes theirs. Both are right. What does it mean that openness itself is a sovereign decision rather than a virtue? Apply the principle to something your own community controls.
  6. Compare this week to the Tlingit sibling course’s Week 7, which describes the ku.éex' in public detail. Two neighboring traditions, two sharing decisions, one course honoring both. What have you learned about “Northwest Coast culture” from the fact that this comparison exists at all?

If you carry Coast Salish heritage

[CO-AUTHOR block, wholly. If the right content here is nothing, nothing is right.]

Sources for deeper reading

Thom’s open-access WIPO paper is the single best door. Bierwert’s Brushed by Cedar [AMAZON LINK] models the method. An Iron Hand Upon the People [AMAZON LINK] covers the ban years. The CARE principles paper is free online.

NW Native Art • The Reading Shelf • Noisy Waters